How can I get my photos to look like this?

[Katerina Stavreva]

Can anyone help me recreate the color processing of these pictures? I'm not sure how to describe it exactly but they seem to have this intense dark gloomy feel and skin colors almost have a silverish shine to them if that makes sense. I'm attaching a few examples and also a couple of instagram feeds that have this effect to almost all of their photos.

Any help is much appreciated!

 

[Tom Mann]

IMHO, the post-processing (PP) of these pix is not extraordinary and is not even close to being the major contribution to their look and feel. The "look" that I think you are interested in is, IMHO, primarily due to careful choice of background and lighting, which, together with a decent camera/lens produces a nice, sophisticated effect.

Note that in all three photos, the background is either completely grayscale (photo #2), or strongly desaturated (in the case of photos #1 and #3). In addition, in the 1st and 3rd photos, the model also is in clothing almost devoid of color. In all three cases, the lighting is moderately diffuse and is coming in from the right, ie, almost exactly perpendicular to the camera's viewing direction. This is important to add some drama to these images. It's a lighting effect that beginning photographers almost never use.

WRT PP, the one thing that I would note is that the white balance is done very precisely to preserve the quasi-monochrome look, and great care was obviously taken to ensure the skin colors were good. Other than possibly a bit of "curves" to darken some of the shadow areas, I doubt much else was done to these in PS.

HTH,

Tom M

 

[Tom Mann]

BTW, the above comments were not to say that someone could not take a photo where the background and lighting was not as I described above, and then use PS to try to shoehorn the image into this look, but I don't think that's the way these were done.

Tom M

 

[Katerina Stavreva]

IMHO, the post-processing (PP) of these pix is not extraordinary and is not even close to being the major contribution to their look and feel. The "look" that I think you are interested in is, IMHO, primarily due to careful choice of background and lighting, which, together with a decent camera/lens produces a nice, sophisticated effect.

Note that in all three photos, the background is either completely grayscale (photo #2), or strongly desaturated (in the case of photos #1 and #3). In addition, in the 1st and 3rd photos, the model also is in clothing almost devoid of color. In all three cases, the lighting is moderately diffuse and is coming in from the right, ie, almost exactly perpendicular to the camera's viewing direction. This is important to add some drama to these images. It's a lighting effect that beginning photographers almost never use.

WRT PP, the one thing that I would note is that the white balance is done very precisely to preserve the quasi-monochrome look, and great care was obviously taken to ensure the skin colors were good. Other than possibly a bit of "curves" to darken some of the shadow areas, I doubt much else was done to these in PS.

HTH,

Tom M

Thank you, this is really helpful!!! I never thought about lighting that way. I've also found that boosting whites and decreasing blacks or increasing clarity kind of gives me a similar effect but that's very harsh on human faces so I thought there must be some other trick to it.

 

[Tom Mann]

Glad to have helped, Katerina. In advanced photography, lighting truly is *EVERYTHING*. For the type of work I do, I would much rather have an old camera with a good set of lights and modifiers than the newest camera with no lights.

Anyway, if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Best regards,

Tom M